Catharsis
by skyeward
Summary: They do not have a relationship. Even they're not sure what they have. Inspired by the differences. I don't know where the rest came from, but it was relatively slow-going for my writing and it still didn't come out well. Sorry. I'm still messing around with it.


They hold their differences, obvious even to the untrained eye, between them and the world.

In appearance they are night and day. One thick but toned, lush in her curves and the flow of her hair, showing little skin but keeping few details hidden. She flaunts her unearned attractiveness in a grand show of misdirection - not many can see the ruthless competency lurking under the cloak of in-your-face sex appeal. She practically smells like old money and availability, but Miranda shrouds herself in ice that keeps unwanted attention at bay. Jack is her opposite in ways both obvious and not. She is lean and hard and tight all over, thin arms and small breasts echoing the gangliness of youth and the emaciation of long imprisonment, well-earned muscle the only thing that separates her from a skeleton with tattoos. Her skin is bare but her body unreadable, a violent tapestry of her life that she reveals not to tittilate but to intimidate and obfuscate. She is unmistakably a criminal, and she wears her anger like armor - it's safer that way.

Miranda's story begins as a fairy tale and ends in unexpected fashion: the wealthy, pampered princess raised in an ivory tower to embody perfection, imprisoned not by a dragon but by her own father, rescued not by a prince but by her own strength of body and will. If anyone in her life is a proper princess it would be her sister, for whom she would burn down the world. Jack has a story that begins in tragedy and ends, as expected, with more of the same. There is a limit to what the human mind can overcome, a limit to the amount of civility that will cling to a woman who has been a tortured child science experiment, a slave, a slaver, a smuggler, a pirate, a 'vandal'. Polite society will not have her and she will not have it, and so she became a prisoner of the law and one man's greed, only to be rescued by a force of nature who is the closest thing she's ever seen to a prince: Shepard.

Even their patterns of behavior and reaction are different, at least at first glance. When the situation calls for threats, one takes her stance and draws her gun, cool and professional and well-trained, while the other simply crosses her arms and smirks, allowing the blue glow of her uniquely powerful abilities to flare around her. Miranda is a professional down to her bones; she doesn't judge Jack's behavior because she is too busy plotting bullet trajectories and the possible flight paths of everyone and everything in the room. Jack is what she is. She doesn't think or care about those things and will continue to not think or care about them until they are in her way or attacking her. She spends the free CPU cycles, so to speak, judging Miranda. Sometimes it baffles her that the other is so quick to draw her gun and so slow to let fly with her biotics. Other times, when she's feeling especially proud or uncharitable, it makes brilliant sense - why bother flaring biotics that can never measure up to the human supernova standing nearby?

Then again, if that were the measure for choosing how to attack, the whole world would stand back and let Shepard do all of it; who can compare to the living legend, back from the dead? Those thoughts make her uncomfortable, and she lets them go.

That is not to say that they do not have anything in common, only that they prefer not to make those things known.

They have both suffered betrayal, both suffered the unkind attempts of men who tried to mold them into things they never wanted to be. They both escaped, spent time simply fleeing their pasts while burning with the desire to destroy the people and the places that made them.

Neither is as cold as she thinks she is; they both have weaknesses and soft spots and tender memories, but they are both colder than most around them. They are willing, even eager, to do the hard things that must be done if their goals are to be accomplished. They are deadly, and if they were ever to count up their tallies the numbers would be disconcertingly similar.

On the whole, they choose not to acknowledge aloud the things that they share simply because they do not want to. Their histories are private, their wounds and weaknesses and feelings not for public consumption. They do not even share these things with each other, although each woman is aware that she is one of those aforementioned weaknesses, that at least some of those weak and tender and vulnerable feelings are directed at her. They do not speak of the thing between them except in terms of hate and anger. They do not express any emotion that might be interpreted as affection, because although their feelings are real and true and powerful, they are also weaknesses to be exploited and both women are sharks to blood when it comes to weakness.

They both have a need for control that cannot be reigned in, and that is one of the few things they will actually admit to having in common. They take orders on the battlefield, take cover when and where they're told to, take down the targets given them with military precision, but at any other time, in any other place, they are their own women. One phrases her mutiny more politely than the other, but neither accepts an order simply because it is an order. Loyalty be damned.

Naturally that need for control extends to other areas of their lives, and the clashing of two intensely dominant personalities results in a dazzling array of broken furniture and one near-miss with a hull breach as they fight for control both in bed and out. The aftermath of that battle is spectacular, even if it has to be relocated to Jack's hidey hole where the entire engineering deck can hear them.

That is the other thing they'll admit to sharing: an intense fascination with struggle, with danger, with the fine line between life and death. They don't have to say the words aloud; the intensity of their fucking after their fight for dominance nearly ends in death by vacuum speaks for itself.

Shepard has words for them after that, but neither woman cares. They're preparing to fly into the eye of the storm and neither has any plans for afterwards, because they'll probably be dead. So now seems as good a time as any to indulge in a little catharsis, scratch a few of their more socially unacceptable itches.

And if their kisses are a little too gentle for hate sometimes, their eyes a little too searching, if they revel a little too long in the softness and warmth of skin on skin as their bodies intertwine in the afterglow…

Well, they'll be dead soon anyway.


End file.
